Cross-site template sharing in SGEN
How to reuse design system, templates, and media across your portfolio
Running multiple sites under one SGEN account does not automatically mean shared design. By default each site has its own theme, its own design system, its own media library, and its own page templates — the isolation is intentional so a redesign on site A never leaks into site B.
When you do want to reuse design — for example a brand portfolio that shares typography and colour, or an agency with a house style — SGEN gives you three mechanisms to choose between. Each has trade-offs in how tightly the sites stay in sync, how much per-site customization you keep, and how much manual work is involved.
This guide covers the three patterns, when to pick each, and what to expect after you commit to one.
What is this for?
Cross-site design reuse is for teams running two or more sites under the same account that want a consistent look without rebuilding from scratch each time. The reuse can range from "copy once, edit freely" to "central source, propagate updates" depending on how strict you want consistency to be.
Three mechanisms are available:
- Clone-on-create. When you add a new site, pick Clone from existing site as the starter content. The new site begins as a snapshot of an existing site — design, templates, settings copied once. After cloning, the two sites are independent.
- Template export and import. Build a page or section on site A, save it as a custom template, export the template, import it into site B. One-direction copy; subsequent edits on either side do not sync.
- Manual design system replication. Open the Theme Editor on site A, write down the colours, typography, spacing scales, and corner radii, then enter the same values on site B's Theme Editor. Tedious but the most explicit.
There is no live two-way sync between sites. Updates to a shared template on site A do not flow to site B automatically. This is by design — multi-site is built around content isolation first, with reuse as an explicit step.
Each mechanism trades off effort against consistency:
- Clone-on-create is the lightest effort and gives the highest day-one consistency, but consistency erodes as the sites diverge.
- Template export and import is per-template — you choose what to share and what to keep unique.
- Manual replication is the most labour-intensive and the most explicit. You know exactly which values match because you typed them on each site.
Good use cases
Acme Coffee, Acme Wine, and Acme Bookstore all want to feel like Acme — same heading typography, same body font, same primary colour. Use manual design system replication: one set of theme values entered three times. The sites then evolve their unique content layout while sharing the brand-level theme.
The agency builds a polished header-footer template once on a "house style" site, exports it, and imports it as the starting header-footer on each new client site. The clients then customize the header logo and footer links — the structural template stays unchanged.
The retail site has a fully built design language. Clone-on-create copies the retail design into the wholesale site, then the wholesale site evolves its own product grid layout. Day one shipped, day five customized.
Acme Coffee US and Acme Coffee UK share design but have different products and content. The UK site clones from US, then swaps copy, currency, and regional contacts. The shared design language stays consistent across regions.
Each quarterly campaign clones from a "campaign starter" site that has the brand's hero, footer, and contact patterns ready. Campaign teams add the campaign-specific landing pages on top.
Acme Wholesale (B2B) and Acme Direct (D2C) both belong to the same parent brand. They share visual identity but differ in checkout flow, pricing display, and product catalog tone. Manual theme replication keeps brand identity aligned; everything else evolves freely.
Each location has its own site with its own menu, but the brand chrome is shared. Clone-on-create plus per-site menu customization is the path.
What NOT to use this for
SGEN does not push design changes from one site to another automatically. If you change a colour on the source site, the cloned sites do not update. Use external design tooling (Figma, brand kits) as the single source of truth and propagate manually.
Templates are structural — they do not carry live content between sites. If you want one blog post to appear on two sites, you publish twice, not once.
Each site has its own media library. The Template export/import does carry referenced media files, but it does so as copies — once imported, the media on the destination site is a new asset, not a shared one.
Form definitions can be templated, but form submissions stay scoped to the site they were submitted on. There is no cross-site form-submission pool.
Cloning copies pages at create time only. Editing a page on the source site does not edit the same page on the cloned site.
Drafts live in the site they were created in. No cross-site draft sharing.
Customer accounts (sign-up logins on the public site) are scoped per site. A user account on site A does not log in on site B.
Each site has its own search index. There is no portfolio-wide search.
How this connects to other features
The clone-on-create option is the cleanest moment to copy a full design. The other two mechanisms (template export and manual replication) can be used at any time on existing sites.
Manual design system replication relies on the Theme Editor to enter and verify values. Every site has its own Theme Editor instance.
The platform's built-in templates show on every site. Your custom-saved templates are per-site by default and require explicit export to share with another site.
Per-site. Template imports that reference media files copy those files into the destination site's library.
Per-site. Copying a Custom CSS snippet from one site to another is a copy-paste action in the admin.
Restoring a backup on site B does not migrate B to look like A. Backups are scoped per site.
Sharing design does not share analytics. Each site reports its own visitors, sessions, and conversions.
Template export and import actions show in your account audit log alongside other admin actions.
Before you start
Pick the mechanism that fits your consistency target:
Decide before you start, since switching mechanisms later usually means redoing the reuse work.
Three quick questions can clarify the right pick:
The honest answer to these usually narrows the choice to one mechanism.
- One-time design copy with full independence after. Use clone-on-create. Best when you want a fast start and accept that the sites drift over time.
- A specific reusable component or page pattern. Use template export and import. Good for header-footer patterns, hero blocks, pricing-page structures.
- Shared brand fundamentals, individual layouts. Use manual design system replication. Best when only the theme tokens need to match — colour, typography, spacing — and the page layouts are intentionally different per site.
- Brand integrity beyond what platform tooling enforces. Pair platform reuse with an external brand source-of-truth (a brand kit document, design system in Figma) so the "real" definition lives outside any one site.
Where to go
The three mechanisms each have their own location in the admin.
- Clone-on-create. Only available at site provisioning. SG-Dashboard → Sites → + Add New → Starter content → Clone from existing site.
- Template export. Inside any site. Site → Templates → Custom Templates → [select template] → Export.
- Template import. Inside the destination site. Site → Templates → Custom Templates → Import.
- Theme Editor (for manual replication). Inside each site. Site → Design → Theme Editor.
The Custom Templates page lists all templates saved on that site. The Export action is per-template; you cannot export multiple templates as a bundle today.
The Theme Editor opens with the current site's design system loaded. Switching sites and reopening Theme Editor loads the new site's values — there is no side-by-side comparison view across sites within the platform.
Steps — Three reuse paths, end-to-end
1. Path A — Clone-on-create
When you add a new site, the simplest reuse path is to pick Clone from existing site as the starter content. The new site provisions as a snapshot of the source.
This option only appears at site creation time. You cannot retroactively clone an existing site into another existing site — the destination site must be brand new.
2. What clone copies
Cloning copies:
- All page templates and the design system (theme values, typography, colour, spacing).
- Custom CSS and Custom Codes snippets, including their on/off states.
- Site settings: SEO defaults, header/footer markup, sitemap settings, robots settings.
- Custom templates saved in the source site's Templates library.
Cloning does not copy:
- Form submissions and submission-inbox state.
- Visitor analytics history.
- Media library files (referenced templates carry placeholders pointing at empty asset slots until you re-upload).
- Per-site role assignments (the cloned site uses the inherited account team unless you scoped it down).
- Live or scheduled posts in the blog — only template-level structure is cloned, not authored content.
The boundary is design and structure (cloned) vs operating-state data (not cloned). This matches what most operators want: a new site that looks like the source, with a blank operating record.
3. Path A finish — Diverge the clone
After cloning, the two sites are independent. Edits on the source do not propagate. Edits on the clone do not affect the source. This is the right model when you want a fast start and individual evolution.
You can verify the clone landed by opening any page in the new site and comparing visually with the source. Layouts, fonts, and colours should match. Content placeholders may show empty image slots where source media was not bundled.
4. Path B — Export a template from the source site
Inside the source site, navigate to Site → Templates → Custom Templates. Pick a template you want to share (a hero block, a pricing section, a full page layout). Click Export.
The export form asks:
- A Template name for the export file.
- Whether to Include media (referenced images).
- Whether to Include global styles (any Custom CSS the template uses).
- The Export format — a single SGEN template file or an HTML + assets folder.
Pick Single file for the common case; the folder format is for advanced users who want to inspect or edit the export before importing.
5. Path B continued — Save the export
Save the export file locally. The file is portable across SGEN accounts (an agency could export from one client account and import to another) but the typical case is moving between sites in the same account.
Storing exports in a shared team folder works well for agencies — the team builds a library of pre-vetted templates and pulls from it on each new client onboarding.
6. Path B continued — Import into the destination site
Open the destination site's admin. Navigate to Site → Templates → Custom Templates → Import. Upload the export file. The platform parses the file, lists what is being imported (template, media, custom CSS), and asks you to confirm.
Click Import. The template appears in the destination site's Custom Templates list. Pages built from the template now render the same way on the destination site as they did on the source site.
If the template referenced media that was bundled in the export, those media files copy into the destination site's media library as new assets. The original media on the source site is untouched.
7. Path B continued — Use the imported template
The imported template is now a regular Custom Template on the destination site. Build a page from it the same way you would any template — pick it from the template picker when creating a new page or section.
Future edits to the template on the destination site only affect the destination site. The source-site version stays as it was at export time. There is no link or sync between the two copies.
8. Path C — Manual design system replication
For brand-level consistency without copying any layout, replicate the design system manually. Open the source site's Theme Editor and write down (or screenshot):
- Primary, secondary, and accent colours with their hex values.
- Typography choices: heading font, body font, weights, line-heights, font scales.
- Spacing scale: base unit, multipliers, section padding, container max-width.
- Component-level defaults: button corner radius, card shadow, link colour, hover treatments.
- Image-handling rules: aspect ratios for hero images, thumbnail sizes, alt-text defaults.
Take screenshots of the Theme Editor's panels as well — they capture the visual context around each value, which helps when you are entering the same values on the destination site weeks later.
9. Path C continued — Enter the same values on the destination site
Open the destination site's Theme Editor. Enter the same values. Save. The destination site's components, type, and colour now match the source.
Future changes are intentional — if the source updates its primary colour, the destination does not change unless you go and update it too. This is the right model when you want explicit brand control and accept the manual effort.
A spreadsheet or brand kit document can act as the canonical source of truth for the values, with each site's Theme Editor entering values from that document. This pattern works well for teams of two or more brand managers across sites.
What success looks like
You know reuse landed correctly when: For a brand-portfolio operator: opening the homepage of any site in the portfolio shows the same typography and colour, recognizable as the same brand at a glance. Inside each site, the content is unique. For an agency: rolling out a new client site starts from a known house-style template instead of from a blank page. The team's hours per launch drop because the structural patterns are pre-built. For an operator running localized regional sites: visiting any region's site shows the brand's consistent visual identity. Inside the admin, each region's team works independently on locale-specific content.
- The destination site's pages render the same as the source site's pages for the templates you shared.
- The destination site's design system tokens (colour, typography, spacing) match the source for the values you copied.
- The destination site's Custom CSS and Custom Codes include any snippets the imported template needed.
- The source site is unchanged — you can verify by reloading the source admin and confirming nothing moved.
- The destination site has its own version of any media that was bundled in a template export — the source-site media is not shared, it was copied.
- New pages built from imported templates work the same way they did on the source.
- The destination site's audit log records the import action with timestamp and actor.
What to do if it does not work
A few less-obvious cases:
Most likely cause: the template depended on Custom CSS or Custom Codes that did not export. Check the destination site's Custom CSS and Custom Codes lists. Manually copy any missing snippets from the source.
Cloning copies templates and design but not the media library. Re-upload the media on the destination site or use the template export with Include media checked.
Check that you saved the Theme Editor after entering values. Some fields require an explicit Save click — values that look entered may not be persisted until you save.
The export file may be corrupted or from an incompatible SGEN version. Re-export from the source site and try again. If the second export also fails, contact support with both export files.
Custom fonts uploaded via the Theme Editor are stored per site. Re-upload the font file on the destination site, then enter the same font-family name in the Theme Editor so the styles resolve.
Form definitions are per site, but submissions are too. The destination site has its own empty form-submission inbox after import.
Each site has its own domain. The clone does not inherit the source's domain — you set the destination domain at create time.
Refresh the admin tab. The Custom Templates list caches briefly; a refresh reloads the list with the newly-imported template visible.
Custom fonts are per-site. The template knows the font-family name but the font file itself needs to be uploaded to the destination site separately.
Worked example — Acme house style across three sites
Acme's three sites — Coffee, Wine, Bookstore — all share Acme's typography, primary colour, and spacing rhythm. The path the design lead walked:
- Defined the brand kit externally. Two pages in the team's shared document — Brand Colours and Brand Typography. Each value with a name and a use case.
- Set Acme Coffee as the canonical implementation. Acme Coffee was the first site. Its Theme Editor was populated to match the brand kit. The site was used as a working reference.
- Cloned Acme Wine from Acme Coffee on day one. Pricing-page structure, footer layout, header pattern all carried over. The Wine team customized the homepage and added a wine grid.
- Created Acme Bookstore from a fresh provisioning + manual theme replication. The Bookstore brand wanted a different homepage feel — a literary tone, more text-led layouts. Cloning would have brought too much coffee-shaped structure. Manual theme replication kept the typography and colour while leaving layout fresh.
- Quarterly drift audit. Every quarter, one person opens each site's Theme Editor and compares against the brand kit document. Drift is corrected in the affected site.
After eighteen months: the three sites still look like Acme at a glance. Inside, each tells a distinct brand story.
Worked example — Agency reuses house header pattern
A small agency manages eight client sites. Every client wants a slightly different header, but the agency wants its production efficiency to come from a strong house pattern.
- The agency built a "house header" on its own portfolio site. Three rows: top utility bar with phone and email, main row with logo and primary nav, secondary row with breadcrumb and search.
- Exported the template with media and styles included. The export file landed in a shared team folder.
- For every new client site, imported the house header as the starting point. Each client site then customized: swapped the logo, edited the phone number, changed colour to the client's brand, tweaked nav items.
- Six months in, the agency redesigned the house header. New version: simpler two-row layout. Re-exported. New client sites starting after the redesign use the new header. Existing client sites stayed on the old header (intentionally — the agency does not push updates without a client conversation).
- One client requested an update. The agency imported the new house header into that client's site as a second template, helped the client swap pages over, and the old template was retired on that site.
The pattern: agency owns a house style centrally, propagates by import-and-customize per client, does not push retroactive updates without consent.
Notes on what is per-site vs portable
The platform draws a clear line between per-site state and portable design assets. Worth memorizing:
Per-site (not portable):
- Visitor analytics history
- Form submissions
- Customer accounts (public-side sign-ups)
- Comment threads
- Search index
- Backups
- Domains
- Plan tier and billing line items
- Site name
Portable (carryable via clone or export):
- Theme Editor values (colour, typography, spacing)
- Custom templates
- Custom CSS snippets
- Custom Codes snippets
- Site settings (SEO defaults, header/footer markup)
Per-site by default but copyable via template export:
- Media files referenced by templates
- Font files uploaded via Theme Editor
- Inline images embedded in template HTML
Understanding the line removes most of the surprise from reuse work. If something is per-site, no mechanism will share it across sites in real time. If something is portable, you choose when and how to propagate.
Common questions
Can I share a single design system across all sites in real time? Not via platform tooling. SGEN does not push design changes between sites. Use an external brand kit as the source of truth and update each site's Theme Editor when the kit changes.
Can I share Custom CSS between sites? Not as a live link. You can copy-paste Custom CSS snippets between sites (open the source snippet, copy the body, paste into a new snippet on the destination site, save).
Can I share media library between sites? No live sharing. Each site has its own media library. Template exports with Include media checked copy referenced media files into the destination site as new assets.
Does cloning a site reset analytics? The cloned site starts with empty analytics history. The source site's analytics are unaffected.
Can I make a "primary" site that others sync to? Not natively. Some teams designate one site as the canonical implementation and re-replicate manually from it to the others on a schedule.
Does Theme Editor support a "copy from another site" action? Not currently. Theme values are entered per site. Future versions of the platform may add this; for now, manual entry is the path.
Can I export an entire site as a template for another site to clone from? Clone-on-create at site provisioning does this in one step. There is no full-site export-then-import flow outside of provisioning.
Will updating a template on the source site update imported copies on other sites? No. Template export is a one-time copy. The destination's template is a new template entry, edited independently.
Can I prevent one site from changing the shared design? Not via platform locks. Use per-site role permissions to scope who can change the Theme Editor on each site.
Does sharing templates affect site performance? No. Each site renders from its own files. Reuse is a content/design pattern, not a runtime dependency between sites.
Can I bulk-export several templates at once? Not in the current platform version. Export each template separately. Some agencies script around this externally by re-exporting their full library on a schedule.
Is there a version history on imported templates? The imported template is a new template on the destination site. Editing it creates a normal edit history on that site. The version on the source site is independent.
Can I share a custom font without sharing a template? Yes — upload the font file directly on each site that needs it via Theme Editor → Custom Fonts → Upload. Use the same font-family name on each site so the styles match.
Does the clone-on-create option work if the source site is on a higher tier than the new site? The clone copies design, not tier. The new site starts at the tier you pick during provisioning. Features that require the higher tier do not work on the lower-tier clone, but the design language carries over.
What if I clone from a site that uses features my plan does not include? The clone provisions on the new site's plan. Features unavailable on the new plan show as inactive on the cloned site. Upgrading the new site's plan activates them.
Related reading
Cross-site design reuse is a content-strategy choice as much as a tooling choice. Pick the mechanism that matches your consistency target, document the brand source of truth outside the platform, and audit periodically. The next read is multi-site permissions, which covers who can change shared design on each site.
Add a second site to your account — the provisioning entry point.
Multi-site permissions and roles — scope who can change shared design on each site.
Consolidated reporting across sites — portfolio-wide reporting once reuse is set up.
Agency client portfolio setup — patterns for agencies reusing a house style.